Perth&Surrounds

Broome&TheKimberley

Discovering areas of untouched wilderness such as stunning gorges, waterfalls cascading into inviting pools, beaches that stretch for miles on end (eighty miles in fact) is an everyday encounter in the North West.

Esperance&TheGoldenOutback

Exmouth&TheCoralCoast

The Ningaloo Reef is the only reef you can walk to. As the closest fringing reef to shore, getting up close to its teeming marine life is as easy as wading in from the beach for a snorkel at Exmouth or Coral Bay.

Street Art and Silos – WA’s Outdoor ArtTrail

Whether they’re visiting the city or the outback, the north or the south, WA’s abundant outdoor galleries mean that art enthusiasts and novices alike will find art to be entranced by.

Perth’s street-art boom

Kick off your artful explorations in Perth, where street-art expert Nikki Atack fills us in on the city’s booming mural scene

Nikki and Duncan Atack started the ‘Streets of Perth’ Facebook page four years ago to document the city’s nascent street-art scene. Now they have more than 200,000 followers, and Perth has become an internationally recognised street-art epicentre following the launch of the PUBLIC street-art festival in 2014. The brainchild of cultural organisation FORM, the festival showcased national and local artists, with more than 180 street murals being painted in the first festival.

“Artists who were up-and-comers four years ago are now being really well commissioned and putting their day jobs on the backburner,” says Nikki. “International artists are working here, and local artists are being flown to America and London and Portugal to paint. Perth is really on the map now: there’s colour everywhere.”

Photo:PUBLIC Silo Trail, Newdegate

This artistic blossoming has been aided and abetted by sympathetic local councils’ more relaxed approach to policing graffiti. “There are councillors who keep in touch with us,” Nikki confirms, “and we don’t hear much from the police any more. Even if there is an illegal wall, if the mural is beautiful, they tend to preserve it.”

The relationship between art, food and drink is proving a fertile one in Perth, as Nikki elaborates: “The biggest trend we’ve seen is café and restaurant owners coming to us and saying, ‘We want a mural: who do we talk to?’ They know that if they have a beautiful artwork that’s Instagram-worthy, it’s going to attract people to see it.”

For visitors to Perth who want to engage with the scene, Nikki points people towards the Google map on the ‘Streets of Perth’ website: “We’ve plotted about 300 murals on there. There are also a couple of great city walking tours: Oh Hey WA do a street-art and small-bar tour. But in the city, you can’t walk more than a block or two without seeing some street art. We just encourage people to put their phones down and their eyes up: it’s in those city laneways and carparks that you can really discover the magic.”

Photo:PUBLIC Silo Trail, Albany

Wheat silos and wildflowers

Moving west into WA’s Wheat Belt, something unexpected and quite special has been happening to small-town wheat silos. Commissioned by FORM in partnership with CBH Group, seven groups of 30-metre-high silos – in Northam, Ravensthorpe, Merredin, Katanning, Albany, Newdegate and Pingrup – have been adorned with gorgeous, colourful murals as part of the PUBLIC Silo Trail.

Dipping into hundreds of litres of paint, acclaimed mural artists from around the world looked to WA’s rich natural environment for inspiration: seahorses in Albany, lizards in Newdegate, banksia blooms in Ravensthorpe…

Ravensthorpe itself sits within the 1.5-million-hectare Fitzgerald Biosphere, an internationally significant, biodiverse area containing Fitzgerald River National Park and 20% of WA’s native plant species. A gorgeous gallery of wildflower blooms every spring, the Biosphere has become a tourist destination in its own right.

Photo:PUBLIC Silo Trail, Ravensthorpe

Scenes from Lake Ballard

Further north in WA’s Goldfields is a truly surprising artwork. At Lake Ballard near Menzies, an adventurous 200km-dirt-road trek north of Kalgoorlie, Inside Australia is an outdoor installation by acclaimed UK artist Antony Gormley. In 2002, Gormley oversaw the placement of 51 mysterious, willowy metal figures across this dry desert lake.

Aboriginal art encounters

Of course, outdoor art galleries are nothing new to Western Australia’s indigenous peoples, who have been documenting their environment and Dreaming stories at rock-art sites for millennia. Some of the more astonishing examples are the Gyorn Gyorn and Wandjina paintings around the Mitchell Plateau in the Kimberley – a broad collation of 100,000 artworks, arcing back more than 60,000 years.

Photo:PUBLIC Silo Trail, Albany

More-accessible sites are on the Port Warrender Rd into Mitchell River National Park, near the King Edward River at Munurru. Don’t miss ‘Thylacine Rock’, which depicts images of thylacines (aka Tasmanian tigers) which died out on the Australian mainland more than 3000 years ago. There are also accessible sites around Kalumburu, a small community also on the King Edward River; and at the iconic Mitchell Falls in Mitchell River National Park, notably beneath the waterfall at Little Mertens Falls.

With so many events taking place in WA, deciding the best time to visit to catch them can seem a little overwhelming. Luckily, we’ve got hundreds of events to discover at westernaustralia.com/events and some easy filters to help you match your trip to the best events in our state.

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Steadily adding to the already established scene, each of Perth's leafy urban precincts offers varying proportions of contemporary restaurants, gastropubs, cafes, cool bars in heritage buildings and old theatres. Some even have dedicated festivals and pop-up farmers’ markets.

As you leave Perth’s cityscape and enter the Golden Outback, the horizons spread ever wider and your view is ever-changing. Continue on through vast salt lakes and outback plains, and you’ll discover the legacies of gold rush pioneers, incredible wildlife encounters and some of the whitest beaches on Earth.